A Fundamental Fight

When Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or death sentence, on Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, 25 years ago, the novel became more than literature. Talking to Rushdie and those who stood beside him—Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, E. L. Doctorow, and others—Paul Elie assesses the extraordinary impact of a prophetic, provocative book, which turned its author into a hunted man, divided the cultural elite, and presaged a new era.

Nobody said anything about The Satanic Verses at the Morgan Library that night, not even the author. But the book gave the evening an aura of the forbidden that will always surround Salman Rushdie.

The Morgan is one of New York City’s grandest literary spaces—with three Gutenberg Bibles and a Shakespeare First Folio, for starters. On that night last November it was the site of a gathering to celebrate the Man Booker Prize, the venerable British award for fiction. The guest of honor was Rushdie, winner of the prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children and then of the “Booker of Bookers” for the best novel in the prize’s first 25 years.

He swept in just after seven P.M., natty in a gray suit and patterned shirt, which matched the dress worn by his companion, the socialite Missy Brody—and matched his Vandyke beard, now wholly gray. He greeted the publishing titans on hand: Sonny Mehta, Steve Rubin, Nan Talese. He chatted at the bar with his pal Bill Buford, the former fiction editor of The New Yorker. Then he and Buford took the stage and talked about Rushdie’s role as the “godfather of Indian fiction.”

Their topic was Midnight’s Children, not The Satanic Verses, but the notorious book made its presence felt. There in a display of memorabilia was a first edition of the novel, a Booker finalist in 1988; a matted photograph of Rushdie, just past 30, slim, handsome, untouched by terror; and a flyer for a 1989 reading given by famous American writers (Sontag, Mailer, Didion, DeLillo) after Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, pronounced a fatwa, or death sentence, and placed a $1.5 million bounty on the novelist’s head.

Terror is never fully out of mind when Salman Rushdie is in the house. Because it was a private event, the Booker talk did not appear on the Morgan’s calendar and Web site, and this was for the best: no need to raise the author’s visibility and prompt some kind of response like the ones that—25 years ago—sent him underground in the first place.

‘I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman,” Paul Theroux said.

Here was a memorial service for Bruce Chatwin, the tousled, witty travel writer, who had died of AIDS (without naming the disease). Chatwin had converted to the Greek Orthodox faith in his final days, so the boldfaced names of literary London were crowded into a church in Bayswater that February afternoon in 1989. Not just writers; there were “socialites, aristocrats, lords and ladies, travel agents, art dealers, spies, toffs, yobbos, the Duke of Westminster,” Theroux now recalls. Not just any church: “a big Asiatic and gaudy-looking Greek Orthodox thing, like a vast consecrated muffin, with bearded patriarchs intoning weird verses—over our irreverent, once cackling Bruce. Who wouldn’t laugh?”

Rushdie wasn’t laughing. His novel had been under fire since the fall for its depiction of Muhammad, Islam’s founding prophet. Mullahs were burning the book on British high streets. India and South Africa had banned it. There were riots in Islamabad (five dead) and Kashmir (one dead, 100 injured). That morning a BBC reporter had cold-called Rushdie at his house in North London and told him Khomeini had issued a fatwa: how did it feel to be sentenced to death?

“It doesn’t feel good,” he said. But it wasn’t going to keep him from the memorial for a friend. “Fuck it, let’s go,” he said. His then wife—Marianne Wiggins, herself a novelist—went with him to the church. They took seats not far from Theroux, who said, jokingly, “I’m not sitting near you—I don’t want to be in the line of fire.” Martin Amis, Harold Pinter, and Antonia Fraser were in neighboring pews. They all sat baffled through the service—what did a klatch of muttering religious patriarchs have to do with literature, anyway?

A mob was waiting for them outside—a mob of reporters and photographers. “Are you Salman Rushdie?”

A photographer snapped a picture of him, and it shows the arched eyebrows, comb-over, and boxy eyeglasses that caricaturists were already turning into “SATAN RUSHDY,” enemy of Islam.

His friends attended a reception nearby; he went out into the menacing new world that he had seen coming better than anybody.

There are plenty of moments from 1989 when the world changed: the meeting of man and tank in Tiananmen Square, the release of the dissident Czech playwright Václav Havel, the unbricking of the wall in Berlin. But nothing shook the world of belles lettres like the moment when an Islamic dictator said an Anglo-Indian deserved to die for writing a novel. “When a book leaves its author’s desk it changes,” Rushdie has written, and the ordeal of The Satanic Verses presaged the ways the world would change. The big themes of the past quarter-century were previewed there: the rise of Islamist fanaticism; the inequities that sparked a growing rage toward Western values; the impact of media in a global epoch.

The controversy made Rushdie, for his day, an archetypal man on the run—as Edward Snowden is for ours—and he has spent his life since then trying not to be defined by it. Underground, he was forced to take an alias, and he compounded the first names of the authors Conrad and Chekhov into a nom de guerre. He titled his 2012 memoir of the ordeal for this alter ego—Joseph Anton—and wrote it in the third person, as if to slip out of the skin of his notoriety. It is a bold, brave book: the narration makes us feel the fatwa closing in around him, and the story is one Kafka or Kubrick might have imagined, a religious war waged against an ordinary man.

It works so well that it keeps us from seeing how powerfully the novel and the fatwa defined the age for the people who knew Rushdie then, worked on the book, and stood up for it. Twenty-five years later, they decided to retrace those terrifying months, as did the author, who opened up to Vanity Fair.

“The Satanic Verses is the first chapter of the very long and unpleasant story that has, as one chapter, 9/11,” Ian McEwan says. “I initially read the book in purely literary terms—as an extraordinarily playful, exceedingly intelligent novel—and it’s taken all this time to wrench it back into the realm of the literary.”

“It was the first taste we had of the theocratic sensibility,” remarks E. L. Doctorow, who was active in a campaign by PEN (the global organization devoted to defending free expression) in support of The Satanic Verses. “It was our first taste of the relationship between faith and violence in that part of the world.”

Martin Amis (who in a 1990 piece in Vanity Fair profiled his friend who had “vanished into the front page”) says the controversy forced writers to be “more serious” about their work—and their rivals’ work, too. “The notion that writers are a bitchy, touchy, catty, competitive crowd, always scoring points off each other—this was absolutely obliterated by the Rushdie affair,” he believes. “Any writer who was bitchy or catty looked very trivial after the fatwa, because it was a matter of life and death.”

A Beast of a Novel

Rushdie was already known as a provocateur when he was chosen for *Granta’*s first “Best of Young British Novelists” issue, in 1983, along with McEwan, Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Graham Swift, all of whom would become his friends. Already Midnight’s Children had won the Booker Prize—and had drawn legal action from India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, who felt her family had been defamed by Rushdie’s portrait. (The case was settled out of court. The offending sentence was struck from subsequent editions.)

“Granta was based in Cambridge, and Salman came down for a reading in that interregnum [before the Booker],” remembers Bill Buford, the journal’s editor and an early champion. “I warned Salman, ‘Sometimes five people show up.’ ” But this time “half the Anglo-Indian population of Cambridge was there. A woman stood up and said to Salman, ‘Thank you for being the first person to write about my India.’ ”

Rushdie had left his homeland for England at age 13, following the path of his rich and dissolute father. As a student at Cambridge, and later as an adman with Ogilvy & Mather, he had an agonized relationship to India and Islam. He was an outsider in India (as a Muslim), in England (as a “wog”), and in Islam (as an unbeliever), all at once. So he made Midnight’s Children and its successor, Shame, which deals with Pakistan, novels about doubleness. “He knew he could write a book that the Anglo-American critics would get—all the clever boys,” Buford says, “but what the clever boys weren’t getting is that he was writing for that other audience, too.”

On a roll, Rushdie started a giant-size novel about India, Islam, and London. “I didn’t know if it was one book or three,” he has said. “I must have been feeling very confident. I’d had these two very successful books, and that put a lot of fuel in my tank, and I thought I could do anything.”

He spent the next five years writing The Satanic Verses, applying the magic-realist touch to headline news: terrorist airline hijackings, pilgrimages to Mecca, rough-and-tumble immigrant London, and Thatcher-era British unrest. He made the Prophet into a comic figure called Mahound (Muhammad, put profanely). He etched an acid portrait of a “bearded and turbaned Imam” akin to Khomeini. He took the novel’s title from a passage of Koranic lore in which words in praise of gods other than Allah—female gods, no less—were said to have issued from the tongue of the Prophet, placed there by the Devil. In the novel, those words of praise would be Mahound’s own. “We don’t talk about our novels while we’re writing them, but he explained the ‘satanic verses’ to me at a party,” McEwan recalls. “It was all new to me.”

He was becoming politically engaged: publishing a book in support of the Sandinistas, joining Harold Pinter’s group of writers against Thatcher, and evolving as a voice against racism in Thatcher’s England, telling white Britons that until they discarded their prejudices “the citizens of your new, and last, Empire will be obliged to struggle against you.”

But his real struggle was with the Verses. “I thought of the novel as a huge monster I was wrestling with,” he says. “I was often worried that I would not be able to get on top of the beast and pin it to the ground. [When it was done,] I was utterly exhausted. One holds so much of a novel in one’s head during the years of work that when it’s done and the thing in your head evaporates it’s a little like having your brain removed. I felt lobotomized.”

He had reason to think that the novel would enchant the London smart set and would speak for England’s people of color. The protagonists were themselves divided: Saladin Chamcha, a businessman “torn, to put it plainly, between Bombay and London, between East and West,” and Gibreel Farishta, a Bollywood film star who “has lost his faith and is strung out between his immense need to believe and his new inability to do so.” Doubleness shaped the depiction of “Babylondon”—“its conglomerate nature mirroring his own”—and of religion, which at different points is treated profoundly, done up in Bollywood-bright cinematic hues, and mocked in the manner of the novel’s own “blood-praising versifiers” and “lampoonist[s].”

The Satanic Verses, says E. L. Doctorow, was a “kitchen-sink novel—one in which the author puts in everything he can think of.”

A few friends read it early on. “It was one of the grandest books I could remember reading,” Buford insists. “But about halfway through I realized I didn’t have the cultural equipment to appreciate it. What I wanted was to say to Salman, Could we go for a weekend and talk about your book? But what Salman wanted to know was ‘Well, is it good or not?’ ”

The Art of the Deal

Andrew Wylie, the literary agent, sold The Satanic Verses to Peter Mayer, the publisher of Viking Penguin, on the ides of March 1988.

Mayer’s small, family-owned house, Overlook Press, had published Rushdie’s first novel, Grimus, in the U.S., but had gotten priced out of publishing Midnight’s Children. Now he was in charge of an international publishing company and was in a position to reclaim his lost author in a big way.

Wylie was representing Rushdie for the first time. Today Wylie is a potentate whose list of more than 700 clients is fitted to his taste as snugly as his bespoke suits. Then he was an outrider with a yen for hard cases—radical journalist I. F. Stone, for one—and a reputation for having been a Max’s Kansas City scene-maker (late nights, graphic verse, public spats).

As the story goes, Wylie read Shame and got in touch—“When I’m in London, can we have a drink?”—and when Rushdie said yes, Wylie caught the next flight over. Rushdie rebuffed him. Some months later Wylie called and told him he was en route to London again. “He said, ‘Where are you?’ I said, ‘Karachi.’ He said, ‘What are you doing in Karachi?’ I said, ‘Representing Benazir Bhutto.’ ” Wylie later said that he signed Bhutto—heir apparent to her executed father as prime minister of Pakistan—just to impress Rushdie. They met in London and soon Wylie was representing the author in the United States.

And representing The Satanic Verses. “I first read 100 pages—Salman sent them to me in New York,” he recalls today. “I was stunned by them—by the broad imagination, the rich style, the humor and intelligence of the text. I knew from the outset that the book was a masterpiece. . . . It was on the basis of those pages that we developed the plan about how best to sell the book internationally.”

Wylie proposed that the surest way to get a big advance was through a world-rights, English-language deal with himself as the deal-maker. Rushdie agreed and parted ways with his U.K. agent, Deborah Rogers, joining Wylie and his U.K. partner, Gillon Aitken.

Wylie, good to his word, landed an astronomical sum from Mayer: $850,000. The publisher carried the bulky typescript to the Adelaide Festival and bestowed it on editor Tony Lacey, who read it in three days straight. “I remember being thrilled by it,” Lacey now says, “though for a publisher it’s hard to separate the genuine literary thrill from the excitement of being offered the new novel of a major writer.”

Mayer says he “read the book in one go on a flight from New Zealand to England. I didn’t understand all of it, because I don’t know a great deal about Islam. I didn’t know that ‘Mahound’ was a dirty word. I don’t say it proudly,” he adds; his was typical of “our Western ignorance of other societies.”

And the sprint toward publication began. Viking editor Nan Graham was assigned to shepherd Rushdie’s book into print, and she enlisted as a second reader Chuck Verrill, who had recently “inherited” another Viking author, Stephen King. “It came in a box from Wylie: this extraordinary father-son story, and an immigrant story, too,” explains Graham, now publisher of Scribner. “And funny too—though I worried that he called Mrs. Thatcher ‘Mrs. Torture.’ Here was a novel saying, ‘I am the colonized and I will speak your language better than you do—I will outsmart the colonizer.’ ”

“The manuscript arrived trailing clouds of glory,” one former Viking colleague contends. “Peter decided that this was the book we would take into the major leagues of world literature, and when the big guy is saying that, the company falls in line.”

Viking U.K. ordered a first printing of 23,500 copies—sizable for little England. In New York, Graham pushed hard for 100,000 copies and a party at Da Silvano, in Greenwich Village. “We had an expensive immigration story to publish, and we had to be very ambitious. We told [the reps] what we had—that this was the greatest piece of literature to cross our desks in a very long time.”

Publishing dates were staggered to create buzz: a British rollout in September; a U.S. debut the following February. Meanwhile, the head of Penguin India asked Mayer to let him delay publishing the novel to avoid triggering any public backlash. “Their order was for something like 200 copies,” Mayer recalls, “so I said, All right.”

Condemned in Advance

Pankaj Mishra—one of the leading Indian writers of the generation after Rushdie’s—was 20 when word of the novel reached Varanasi, which had seen religious violence. “My first, non-literary, selfish thought,” he confesses, was: “I hope there isn’t another Hindu-Muslim, Muslim-police riot here.” Mishra wound up reading the “bits about Islamic history” in a clandestine copy of The Satanic Verses “smuggled in by the visiting father of an American exchange student and passed around in brown paper covers.”

That’s because the book had been banned in India after a friendly interview with Rushdie was headlined AN UNEQUIVOCAL ATTACK ON RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM. Soon enough, a Saudi-funded newspaper in London ran a story about it, and The Satanic Verses was condemned—sight unseen.

It was published in London on September 26, 1988, with a dust jacket describing it as a “great wheel of a book.” Penguin took out an ad (“Wonderful stories and flights of the imagination surround the conflict between good and evil”) and threw a launch party for its list of autumn titles, at which Rushdie met Elmore Leonard and Robertson Davies. Rushdie had a high-spirited dinner with his editors. Lacey, the book’s U.K. editor, recalls the relative naïveté of that evening: “Salman, my paperback colleague Tim Binding, and I vying over who could recite the most Bob Dylan lyrics.”

The novel of doubleness led a double life that fall. In one, it was reviewed, bought, read, and discussed by London literary people. Was The Satanic Verses “several of the best novels that Rushdie has ever written” (Times Literary Supplement)? “A novel of metamorphoses, hauntings, memories, hallucinations, revelations, advertising jingles, and jokes” (The Times)? Or an adventure in “unreadability” (Observer), a “wheel that would not turn” (The Independent)?

In its other life it was condemned by people who hadn’t read it. “I do not have to wade through a filthy drain,” said one detractor, “to know what filth is.” Much of the controversy centered on dream sequences involving the Prophet, which were photocopied and passed from imam to imam, such as the sequence in which the agonized unbeliever, Gibreel, dreams of a brothel where the prostitutes take the names of the Prophet’s 12 wives, the better to lure men off the pilgrim path.

Rushdie had wrestled the beast to the ground—but the beast was still a beast.

Penguin hoped that a second Booker Prize for him might quell the controversy. Bruce Chatwin—whose novel Utz was short-listed alongside The Satanic Verses—had suggested to Rushdie that they should make a plan to share the prize if either of them won. Rushdie and Peter Carey—nominated for Oscar and Lucinda—joked about the award. “I hope you win,” Rushdie said. “I couldn’t win if I wrote Ulysses.” On the night of the ceremony, security officers at the Guildhall detained a man who claimed he was a reporter named Salaman. As the short list was read out, a joker in the crowd gesticulated wildly, pretending that a bomb had just gone off. The Booker went to Peter Carey.

In the weeks that followed, there was no groundswell among expat South Asian Muslims saying that the novel spoke for them. Instead, there were death threats and burnings of the author in effigy. Things started small, with a letter one imam addressed to a “Brother in Islam” calling for a signature campaign against “this Satanic book.” Only 20 people showed up for a demonstration in Bradford, in northern England. A burning of the novel near Manchester drew several thousand—but no media coverage. Wised up, some imams put out a press release before another burning—outside the Bradford police station. The size of the volume—542 pages—made it hard to ignite, one imam later claimed, laughing, “so we had to actually find a can of petrol to pour on the book.” It burned, eventually, and the stories plastered across the tabloids the next few days enshrined “the Rushdie affair” alongside the Sex Pistols, striking coal miners, and I.R.A. bombings as one of the peaks of post-empire British discontent.

“This is, for me, the saddest irony of all,” Rushdie said a while later, “that after working for five years to give voice and fictional flesh to the immigrant culture of which I am myself a member, I should see my book burned, largely unread, by the people it’s about, people who might find some pleasure and much recognition in its pages.” It was darkly ironic, too, that the events swirling around the book—charges of blasphemy, demonstrations, book burnings, an imam fighting “by proxy”—could be found in its pages. The Satanic Verses was not just provocative: it was prescient. In its bravura opening passage, the protagonists Saladin and Gibreel—passengers ejected from a hijacked aircraft after a bomb explodes in midair—talk wildly to each other as they plummet to earth over the English Channel. That December, with the book in shops across the British Isles, Libyan terrorists exploded a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland (a city mentioned in the book)—an attack that killed 270 people.

There was a further irony, remembers author Reza Aslan—the Iranian-born American Muslim who ran into controversy last summer with his book on the historical Jesus. It’s that The Satanic Verses, as he reckons, actually wasn’t all that offensive. “The view is that the novel presents a view of Islam that is profoundly heretical,” he says. “But for anyone with some knowledge of the Koran and the controversy, the surprise is how orthodox the novel is in its treatment of Islam. The passages about the satanic verses are perfectly in line” with many traditional commentators on the Koran. In line with scholars, yes—and yet both observant and secular British Muslims were outraged, marching against the novel near the Iranian Embassy on Hyde Park. “I tried to write against stereotypes,” Rushdie wrote, but “the zealot protests serve to confirm, in the Western mind, all the worst stereotypes of the Muslim world.”

Bruce Chatwin died; Marianne Wiggins told Rushdie that she was leaving him. Even so, he accompanied her to her own book party at Michelin House, in Chelsea, and all eyes were on them. “She and Salman were glissant, in pride,” the poet Robin Robertson recalls. “Then a waitress dropped a tray of champagne and the whole place went silent.”

Occupational Hazards

Viking Penguin’s New York offices were located in a cast-iron building on 23rd Street between Fifth and Sixth. Just before the novel came out in America, there was a series of bomb scares. The offices were evacuated each time, leaving the staff to stand on the sidewalk for a couple of hours—“and it was winter,” one employee recalls. “It was cold out there.”

“You would hope to find a phone booth where you could keep doing your work,” Nan Graham recalls. “Or I would finish lunch and call the office to see whether we were open—because otherwise I would just edit at the restaurant: at least it was warm there.”

On some days the company would remain closed until the next morning, and employees would decamp to McQuaids or the Old Town Bar. A young man in editorial and a young woman in sales were turning the pages of The Village Voice on the sidewalk one afternoon when the word of closure came. There was an old Fellini film playing at Cinema Village. They made a date of it. Eventually, they fell in love and got married.

Gallows humor went around: If I have to get killed for literature, does it have to be for this guy?

In London, authorities stationed police outside Penguin’s Kensington offices and set up a metal detector. Penguin beefed up security in New York too. Fretful parents of assistants called Mayer and urged him to pull the book. At least one U.S. staffer quit rather than work in fear; another sought treatment for anxiety. Two dogs that sniffed mail—Sailor and Yalta—became known to all.

“I didn’t know that it was an occupational hazard being a publisher,” Peter Mayer now says, seated in his smoke-filled SoHo office, at Overlook Press, which he rejoined after leaving Penguin in 1996. He recalls a blood-spattered letter that showed up at his apartment in Kensington; in New York, his young daughter was threatened, and parents at St. Luke’s School, on Hudson Street, asked him to withdraw her, lest a death squad come to the school and shoot the wrong student. He heard the same argument from the board in a building where he was trying to land a co-op: “ ‘What if the killers come and they go to the wrong door?’ I said, ‘The wrong door? You mean, if they come to my door, it’s the right door?’ ”

Going Underground

London’s Reform Club, on the Pall Mall, has had many illustrious authors as members: Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster—and Graham Greene, who, one winter’s day in 1989, lunched at the club with international writers living in London.

“Rushdie!” he called out. “Come and sit here and tell me how you managed to make so much trouble! I never made nearly as much trouble as that!”

“This was oddly comforting,” Rushdie recalled. England’s most famous living author was making light of the fix he was in.

Then the fatwa against The Satanic Verses came down and things turned nasty, and London literary society took sides.

“Nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion,” John le Carré bellowed in The Guardian, “and be published with impunity.” He also proposed that Rushdie do the right thing and withdraw the book. V. S. Naipaul, who felt he had been taken to task for his own acid portrait of Khomeini in Among the Believers, decried the support for Rushdie as hypocrisy: “Certain causes are good, and then other causes become good. Now the good people are saying something else. I wish the good people were a little more consistent.”

Germaine Greer (that good feminist) would eventually mock Rushdie as “a megalomaniac, an Englishman with dark skin.” John Berger (that good Marxist) urged Rushdie to tell his publishers to cease and desist so as to stop a “holy war” before it started.

Roald Dahl (beloved children’s-book author, professed anti-Semite) was the most open in his contempt. “Clearly he has profound knowledge of the Muslim religion and its people and he must have been totally aware of the deep and violent feelings his book would stir up among devout Muslims. In other words, he knew exactly what he was doing and he cannot plead otherwise.” The Satanic Verses was selling strongly, and Dahl insisted that Rushdie had stirred up trouble to get “an indifferent book onto the top of the bestseller list.” Dahl added dismissively: “He seems to be regarded as some sort of a hero. . . . To my mind, he is a dangerous opportunist.”

The “hero,” meanwhile, was on the move. “I was hauled out of an editorial meeting” to take a call from Rushdie, British editor Tony Lacey recalls, “and I had to ask him what a fatwa was: I’d never heard the word. He said he would be going into hiding.”

From hiding, Rushdie issued a statement of regret for “the distress that publication has occasioned to sincere followers of Islam. Living as we do in a world of many faiths this experience has served to remind us that we must all be conscious of the sensibilities of others.” From Tehran, Khomeini doubled down: “Even if Salman Rushdie repents and becomes the most pious man of all time, it is incumbent on every Muslim to employ everything he has got, his life and his wealth, to send him to hell.”

Reza Aslan, looking back (he was a teenager when the book came out), says this was no surprise. Iran had just ended an eight-year war with Iraq, and Khomeini was eager to change the subject. And this new war was personal. “An offense against early Islam—that, in the end, wasn’t the reason for the fatwa,” Aslan says. “The book’s vision of the black-turbaned mullah who opens his jaws and swallows innocent people—that is what was offensive to Khomeini.”

Rushdie’s friends circled round him. Deborah Rogers—the agent he had dismissed in favor of Wylie—put their rift behind them and suggested her country place as a safe house: who would look for him at a cottage owned by the agent he’d just dumped? Harold Pinter and Antonia Fraser hosted a stealth reunion of Rushdie’s family at their house on Campden Hill Square. As Ian McEwan lent Rushdie his cottage in Gloucestershire, a routine was taking shape, McEwan says: “Security people making a sweep of the house, and then Salman bounding in with a strange mixture of high energy, craziness, and relief that he was all right.”

Rushdie: “It was the first time I’d been able to meet with any of my friends since February 14. . . . We had a ridiculously funny and relaxed dinner together, as if we were all colluding in a fiction of ‘normality.’ ”

McEwan: “I remember standing the next morning with Salman in the country kitchen, a gray English morning, and he was the lead item on the BBC—another Middle East figure saying he too would condemn him to death. It was a very sad moment—standing buttering toast and listening to that awful message on the radio.”

Rushdie: “Ian was very upset. For me, there were threats like this every day, sometimes two or three times. . . . I was shaken, I’m sure, but Ian is a loving man, and I think he was even more shaken than I was by the violence of the assault on his friend.”

The British establishment set itself against the book and its author: from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie (who invoked England’s blasphemy laws), to the foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe (who deemed the novel “extremely critical [and] rude” about Britain). Even Jimmy Carter—he whose presidency had been quashed by Khomeini—weighed in against the “insult to the sacred beliefs of our Moslem friends.”

“I had an argument with Prince Charles at a small dinner party,” Martin Amis recollects. “He said—very typically, it seems to me—‘I’m sorry, but if someone insults someone else’s deepest convictions, well then,’ blah blah blah . . . And I said that a novel doesn’t set out to insult anyone. ‘It sets out to give pleasure to its readers,’ I told him. ‘A novel is an essentially playful undertaking, and this is an exceedingly playful novel.’

“The Prince took it on board, but I’d suppose the next night at a different party he would have said the same thing.”

The Columns

Salman Rushdie, in short order, was England’s most famous living author, but he couldn’t go to America to promote his new book, such was the challenge of remaining among the living. There would be no canapés at Da Silvano.

Instead, there would be a book launch like no other. At midday Wednesday, February 22, a cadre of writers met at Jerry’s, on Prince Street, in Lower Manhattan, and then strode in the rain to the Columns, a loft space near Houston Street. Several thousand people were in line outside. The occasion was a reading from The Satanic Verses, marking publication day. Across the street, a counter-demonstration was under way.

“There was never an easier situation for PEN: a respected Anglo-Indian with pals in London and New York’s literary circles versus the bearded brute in Iran,” Gay Talese reflects. “We were all on a ‘safe’ and locally popular issue, for a change.”

As Rushdie tells it in his memoir, the reading came about after Susan Sontag—who was president of PEN—“whipped” her fellow writers into line. A photo from the next day’s Times shows an impressive row of New York literary lions: Sontag, tightly wound; Talese and Doctorow, somber in jackets and ties; Mailer loose of coat and collar; DeLillo staring at the camera from the background. Here again, like the gathering of the literary tribe at that church in London a few weeks earlier, were a generation’s great voices coming together with great clarity of purpose to recognize a writer’s life.

The idea for the gathering came from Gerald Marzorati, who had carved out an excerpt of the book that ran in the December Harper’s, and then wrote a Rushdie profile for The New York Times Magazine. Why not a public reading of Rushdie’s novel, to be coordinated by PEN and Harper’s publisher John “Rick” MacArthur? “I was given the task of choosing excerpts because very few people in New York had actually read the book,” Marzorati says, pointing out that the roster of participants was very broad—from Abbie Hoffman on the left to Midge Decter on the right. Edward Said was there; so was Leon Wieseltier. Robert Caro was there; so was Tom Wolfe. Joan Didion was there; so was Larry McMurtry.

The Columns held 500 people, and as the writers entered, cries could be heard from the demonstrators outside. “Death to Rushdie! Death to Rushdie!”

The first author stood up to read, and his opening remark was a kind of answer. “My name is Robert Stone,” he said, “but today we are all Salman Rushdie.”

They read and spoke into the evening. Mailer said of the fatwa, “This must be the largest hit contract in history.” Talese recited the Lord’s Prayer. Wieseltier declared that “one day the Muslim world may recall with admiration its late-20th-century Anglo-Indian Voltaire.” Rushdie’s close friend Christopher Hitchens transformed a single sentence from the novel into a brilliant defense of the whole: “To turn insults into strengths, whigs, tories, Blacks all chose to wear with pride the names they were given in scorn; likewise our mountain-climbing, prophet-motivated solitary is to be—Mahound.”

“It was inspiring and electrifying,” recalls Gerald Howard, a former Viking editor who was there. “It broke the fever of fear the literary world was living in.”

There was one more surprise. A few days earlier B. Dalton had announced plans not to sell The Satanic Verses, and Waldenbooks decided to remove it from its shelves. This in turn had prompted a call for readers to boycott the two chains. At the Columns, writers denounced the giant booksellers; yet at the same time, many worried about the impact that a boycott might have on sales of their own books.

Viking’s Nan Graham and Chuck Verrill got an idea. Maybe the king of horror fiction could make this particular horror story turn out right. They reached out to Stephen King. And King called B. Dalton’s chief, Leonard Riggio, the same day. King gave Riggio an ultimatum: “You don’t sell The Satanic Verses, you don’t sell Stephen King.”

B. Dalton carried The Satanic Verses—and sold it by the thousands.

“You can’t let intimidation stop books,” King now says, recalling the episode. “It’s as basic as that. Books are life itself.”

It felt like an ending. But the story of the story that is The Satanic Verses was just beginning. In the next few months it would play out daily, through events reported in the news section of the papers rather than the review pages. Bombs exploded in Cody’s bookstore, on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, and half a dozen bookshops in the U.K. The novel’s Japanese translator was shot and killed, its Italian translator stabbed, its Turkish translator attacked. Its Norwegian publisher was shot and left for dead. (He survived.) Two clerics who spoke out against the fatwa—one Saudi, one Tunisian—were shot and killed in Brussels.

New York’s John Cardinal O’Connor derided the book (which he had not read), prompting an aggrieved open letter in the Times from 17 Catholic writers. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau devoted a week of “Doonesbury” to reporting the verdicts of the Tehran-based “Islamic Revolutionary Critics Circle,” which recommended “death by stoning for Leo Buscaglia, Erica Jong and Donald Trump,” and condemned Jeffrey Archer, Eric Segal, Jackie Collins, and Michael Korda—the last “for his turgid prose in The Fortune.”

Rushdie was now “a man with no fixed address” and a visit to him was a madcap affair. “I was told to go to a gay cruising area of Regent’s Park,” Marzorati says. “A guy would approach me and ask for a light, and I was to whisper a sentence I had been told to memorize. Then I was taken to a car, placed in the back, blindfolded, and driven to a safe house, which I have always thought was in Camden Town. There I found Rushdie, among his guards—already two-thirds of the way through a bottle of red wine—puffy, sleepless, heavier than when I had seen him last. We finished a second bottle of wine. He was scared—mostly, I think, of the thought that this was the rest of his life. And who wouldn’t be? Of course, it wasn’t the rest of his life, except it was.”

Rushdie embraced Islam; then, just as suddenly, he turned away. Many in England’s Old Guard rounded on him, having figured out that he was a popular cause but not a popular person. Sir Stephen Spender coolly explained that “it is mass immigration that has got him into the trouble in which he now finds himself.” Former prime minister Edward Heath lamented that Rushdie’s “wretched book” had cost Great Britain “masses of trade.” Auberon Waugh asked “just how much we should exert ourselves, as deeply stained white imperialists, to protect him from his own people.” Hugh Trevor-Roper trumpeted that he “would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring [Rushdie’s] manners, were to waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them.”

In the following months two big things happened. The Ayatollah Khomeini—aged 89—died in Tehran, leaving the fatwa in place. And Penguin opted not to publish The Satanic Verses in paperback. A milestone in the annals of free speech degenerated into an episode in the history of corporate compromise.

“We had a board meeting where the members were split right down the middle,” Tony Lacey remembers. “Editorial (me and others) [were] arguing for publication; others [were] arguing very powerfully that we had too many vulnerable employees around the world—someone saying it wasn’t us that would get attacked but somebody running a Penguin office in Athens or Istanbul.

“Peter [Mayer] swayed the meeting towards publication, and we decided to do it. But that very night a small incendiary device was thrown into a London bookshop, and the following day we postponed the decision.”

Mayer insists that he and Penguin struck the right balance: they published the book, they held their ground in the face of great pressure to withdraw it, and they kept everybody safe. More than 60 people died in the controversy. None were Penguin employees.

Andrew Wylie scoffs at the idea that Penguin’s decision was an agonized response to rapidly unfolding events. “There was a concerted effort by the U.S. and U.K. publishing community to block the paperback publication,” he says firmly. “That effort was spearheaded by Peter Mayer of Penguin. . . . It was shameful, really; there was nothing admirable about it.”

Gradually, Rushdie began to appear in public: led through a back door into Waterstones Piccadilly; conveyed by motorcade to Columbia University; taken by the Royal Air Force to Washington, where he lunched in secret with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and other senators at the Capitol, then surreptitiously took tea with Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham in Georgetown. But he would be a man with no fixed address for another decade—into the age of Bridget Jones and Monica Lewinsky, of Amazon and al-Qaeda.

‘When a book leaves its author’s desk it changes.” The world changes with it, and so does literature, if the book is strong enough. The Satanic Verses is a world-changing book. In 1991, Don DeLillo brought out Mao II, a novel organized around the twin towers of literature and terrorism and featuring a writer in hiding. In 1993, Islamic terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, and among those implicated was a blind Egyptian sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman, who had denounced The Satanic Verses. Amis, McEwan, and Hitchens were turning more and more to the subjects of terror and radical fundamentalism, and after the Trade Center was destroyed, claiming nearly 3,000 lives, the writers amped up the volume. “We respect Islam—the donor of countless benefits to mankind, and the possessor of a thrilling history,” Amis wrote, “but Islamism? No, we can hardly be asked to respect a creedal wave that calls for our own elimination.” McEwan focused a novel—Saturday—around a rally in London against the war in Iraq. Hitchens articulated his fervor against “Islamofascism,” eventually speaking out against all organized religion and explaining how the events of 1989—when “my friend Salman Rushdie was hit by a simultaneous death sentence and life sentence, for the crime of writing a work of fiction”—contributed to his eventual view that “religion kills.”

By then Salman Rushdie had moved to New York and taken up an emphatically public life with Padma Lakshmi, the model and actress turned gourmand. Their life became a thousand and one nights chronicled unkindly in the tabloids, whose columnists seemed to begrudge him his very existence. He had close friends in America. Wylie was in New York, Hitchens was in Washington, and in time Martin Amis would join them, settling in Brooklyn, a few blocks from the Atlantic Avenue import shops, many of their signs in Arabic.

“The fact of being alive compensated for what life did to one,” Rushdie wrote in The Satanic Verses, and he has asserted the fact of his aliveness. In the quarter-century since the fatwa, he has published a dozen books and given scores of public readings and addresses. In 2007 departing prime minister Tony Blair successfully recommended him for knighthood. He has fulfilled a lifelong dream of adapting Midnight’s Children into a feature film. And he has seen The Satanic Verses become, remarkably, just another great book on history’s shelf, regarded less as a forbidden book (talk of the fatwa has diminished with the years) than as a classic of contemporary English-language literature.

Christopher Hitchens’s very public passing from cancer in 2011 prompted Rushdie to reflect on death and his friend. “With most writers, you can see the arc of the work,” he told Hitchens’s widow, Carol Blue, “and you know where the career is going. But with Christopher it’s as if he was stopped midsentence.”

It is easy to forget, but Rushdie’s career might have ended midsentence, too.